Christopher Cotton

View Dr. Cotton's CV

Christopher Cotton is the Jarislowsky-Deutsch Chair in Economic & Financial Policy and Professor of Economics at Queen’s University, where he also serves as Director of the John Deutsch Institute for the Study of Economic Policy (JDI). He holds cross-appointments in the Department of Medicine and the School of Policy Studies, and teaches in the Smith School of Business.

Cotton uses economics to study how policy is made and why evidence so rarely drives it. He has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and other leading journals within and beyond economics. His research focuses on information, expertise, and how organizations and institutions make decisions under uncertainty. His theoretical contributions include work on competitive Bayesian persuasion, informational lobbying, and collective action. His empirical and experimental work spans education, public health, development economics, and the economics of science, combining field experiments, structural estimation, and qualitative methods.

Over the past decade, Cotton’s research has increasingly focused on a central puzzle: why good evidence so often fails to produce good policy, and what institutional design can do about it. This agenda has been shaped directly by his sustained engagement with the institutions he studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he co-founded and directed the NSERC/PHAC-funded One Society Network for Emerging Infectious Disease Modeling, leading national efforts to bring together economists, epidemiologists, and public health leaders to assess pandemic policy, and served on working groups for the Royal Society of Canada and Global Canada. He has led major international development evaluations, including the multi-year IGATE-T Girls’ Education Challenge for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, serves as a board member and research advisor at Limestone Analytics, and advised the Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, World Vision, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and USAID on funding, evidence, and evaluation design.

This combination of theoretical, empirical, and applied work has produced a research program spanning the full evidence cycle, from rigorous evaluation through how findings are assessed and disseminated, to how organizations and governments act, or fail to act, on what evidence shows. His current work includes impact evaluations of health and education programs; a framework for assessing the policy-readiness of scientific evidence (under revision for Science); experiments on incentives in academic publishing and peer review; and research on how organizations adopt or resist new evidence and technology, including his “AI Expertise Paradox” (Issues in Science and Technology, National Academy of Sciences).

Cotton’s COVID-19 leadership culminated in his nomination for the Governor General’s Innovation Award and the edited volume Lasting Disruption: Health, Economic, and Social Impacts of COVID-19 in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025). He has received the Dan Usher Prize for Excellence in Economic Research and was invited to hold the Chair of Excellence in Economics at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He has supervised the research of more than 50 PhD and MA students and teaches across economics, policy studies, and business programs at Queen’s.

He earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University and was previously a faculty member at the University of Miami School of Business.